Window Kitties

Window kitties come and go. They are a big city phenomenon, mostly, but they probably exist in the burbs as well. Discovering suburban window kitties, however, is more problematical: it would involve cruising in a car or walking endless miles and peeking into windows as an unwelcome stranger. Cities allow us to peek into windows with impunity, and cats to peer out at us without censure.

One day these special cats are resting on a second floor window sill and following your progress down the street, the next they are somewhere else taking care of business: lunch, litterbox, or nap.

We usually don't know who they belong to, these window kitties. The owners are seldom seen with their paws on the sill next to their furry friends. They are behind the scenes, out working to support the litterbox, luncheon and nap.

There's something comforting about a window kitty looking out at you. It's through a window in winter and sometimes through a screen in the summer. It is someone who notices you walking down a New York side street when there is no one else around. Of course, they can't call for help if there's a problem, but window kitties have been known to meow a less-than-tentative hello toward faces they find familiar.

Not everyone likes them there, those window kitties, those finding them aloof and mysterious and impenetrable and their eyes piercing through to things that are too private. Many dogs have a goofy, friendly, street-level way of saying hello that's more immediate to a certain temperament.

Window Kitty One lived on a ground floor and vacillated between two bamboo decorated windows on West End Avenue. One could easily be at eye level with her when her eyes were open (usually not for long). But one day, the bamboo shutters covered with rice paper, were closed and Window Kitty One become invisible.

Window Kitty Two lived between Broadway and Amsterdam and you had to look up to her. Sometimes she'd mew hello through the screen because she was only by the window in the summertime. In the winter she probably had a warm spot somewhere inside.

Now Window Kitty Two is gone with her owner to some other place. Some other apartment. Some other city.

If It's Not in Google, Does It Really Exist?

Woe be unto those who were born before Google took over the world.

Alas! I learned to read books and newspapers and magazines. And -- gasp! -- I talk to people!

Not so, apparently, those who grew up with the Internet fully in place.

For the past two years, I have been trying to have the IMDB list a film I made in 1969. It's a real film, trust me. It's called Solstice, and it was shown at film festivals. Some of the people who made it became "famous." I even have a 16mm print of it, and, if you still don't trust me, I'll arrange to meet at a mutually convenient dark street corner and let you hold it in your hand, and I might even project it so that you can see that the images printed on the celluloid add up to a real living breathing "movie."

The faceless gatekeepers at IMDB (the Internet Movie Database to the rest of you) don't believe me.

"We can't find it in Google," they tell me.

"Well, that's because Google didn't exist in 1969," I tell them.

"Yes, but we can find most anything important in Google," they retort. "How about the distributor?"

The distributor was the New York University Film Library. But. They don't exist anymore. And they don't have a website. Maybe they never had a website.

I tell the faceless drone at IMDB this.

"But we can find anything important on Google," they repeat. "If it's not in Google, we can't add it to the database."

So what's the problem? Do they think I'm lying? Do they think the reel of film I'm holding in my hand is some sort of hallucination? Do they want a bribe? Probably not the latter, because they are too cowardly to tell me who they really are let alone supply an address to mail them a bribe. I'll have an easier time meeting you on a dark street corner to show you the actual film than to find out who or where these folks are.

This problem exists in spades on Wikipedia.

One of the main criteria for deleting facts on Wikipedia is how many entries about the "fact" the so-called "editor" can find when they Google the fact.

We have started an important new not-for-profit called the "Digital Nitrate Prize." Suffice it to say that this is a major service to film preservation: it will encourage the full preservation of the original beauty of real motion picture film in the inevitable transition to digital preservation and projection.

However, the "editors" at Wikipedia won't allow us to have an entry about the Digital Nitrate Prize. In fact, we're now threatened with being banned if we try to add it to the online encyclopedia!

There is, of course, the issue of who these "editors" are. Well, the answer is that I have no idea! Nor, I believe, does anyone else have any idea who they are. They are, one supposes, over weight nerds with some vaguely positive form of autism who can sit in front of their computors 24/7 and try to reject facts from being posted in Wikipedia.

To their credit, let me surmise that there must be the internet equivalent of the unwashed masses who would like to see their Great Aunt Minnie listed in Wikipedia who need to be deterred. I'll give them that. There are too many Aunt Minnies in the world for us to read about all of them in Wikipedia. The logistics of telling one Aunt Minnie from another Aunt Minnie makes my brain spin.

But benevolent not-for-profit cash prizes that will save the world's film heritage? How does that parse out?

These guys go by names like "NightRider" or "SlashAndBurn" or "UpUrFactz" and other cute names. I'm supposing most of them are guys because girls don't usually call themselves "DemonKnight," they prefer the internet equivalent of "FlowerDemon" or "DestroyerInPink."

I discovered yesterday that they get "points" for editing. If they make 100 edits, they get to display a little cute graphic on their page.

So "DemonKnight" wants to have this little graphic on his page and is vaguely incapable of doing real research. (We can safely assume that "DemonKnight" has never read a newspaper and plays X-Box simulaneously with editing WikiPedia. Perhaps there's a Nintendo version of Wikipedia that allows you to censor articles using a game controller). How does he do this? Well, you get points for deleting articles. Delete one article, one point! Delete 90 articles, 90 points! Delete 500 articles and you get an even bigger, gaudier graphic. Wow!

And what research does "DemonKnight" do? You guessed. He puts Digital Nitrate Prize into Google and counts how many times Google finds it. There must be a magic number, but we don't know what it is.

But apparently, if it's under 10 or so hits, or God Forbid, no hits at all, it doesn't exist. The fact of there being a board of internationally famous film archivists involved and discussion in the field about it doesn't seem to matter. It's not in Google, and it doesn't exist.

"Google ergo sum!" "I Google, therefore I am!" Take that Rene Descartes!




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LINKS
[Links for The Digital Nitrate Prize: http://www.answers.com/topic/digital-nitrate-prize ]

"Tuh" The New Word In Town

Unfortunately, I've done this myself, so rest easy.

The English word "to," a common and much beloved preposition, has been transmogrified into "tuh" when it is spoken outloud in sentences by an increasing number of Americans (and perhaps those in other countries as well, but I'm not sure because my sample is too small).

It's still spelled "to" (as if it were to be pronounced that way, too), but it is mostly pronounced tuh.

"I went to the store" comes out as "I went tuh the store."

This is not just another case of saying "nuclear" as "new-cue-lar" as one of our current politicians is so fond of doing. No, it is a little hard to keep your tongue moving properly when you say "nuclear" especially if you are not too fond of reading and spelling. Those who say "new-cue-lar" tend to spell it nucular, so they have an excuse. (In case you are confused, it is pronounced "new-klee-are" or something very much like that.)

But this new "tuh" thing is some sort of creeping tongue laziness. We can all see how it's spelled, for heaven's sake. It' s a two letter word composed of "t" and "o." It's hard to mess that up.

It's supposed to be pronunced like "two." They are homonyms, right? 'Two=to' when it comes to pronunciation. That should be easy.

"I want tuh go out tuh the movies."

"Did you take the book back tuh the library or did you give it to you dog to play with." Now there's one where they are differentiated. I think.

Perhaps "to" is pronounced correctly when we want to emphasize it. "Did you give it to her or did you just leave it on the table?" I'll bet you'd say "to" as "two" in that sentence, wouldn't you?
Not that I have any way to know, but when you are reading these sentences to yourself in your head, are you saying "to" as in "two" or do you misprounounce it in your mind as well? I tend to think "to" (as in "two") when I read silently to myself and while I'm typing this.

But, as I previously confessed, I (ahem) do sometimes utter the dreaded "tuh." "So I said tuh the guy that he oughta give it back tuh her! And he told me tuh shove it."

And perhaps you will, too.

Fewer And Fewer Fewers

Fewer and fewer of us use "fewer" as a word. It has been replaced by less.

Modern folks would say "less and less of us use "fewer," but that's wrong, not that you'd know it by listening to anyone else but me and a few of my foolish (or is that "few-less"?) friends. It annoys me to hear otherwise intelligent announcers on, say, NPR, saying "fewer" less and less, if at all. Every day, in fact, there is less use of few.

The difference, for those of you who are too young to remember or just don't or didn't care, is that "less" is for "amounts" of things and "fewer" is for numbers of things or people.

Here're the examples.

• There is less water in the short glass than in the tall glass.
• There are six people in the blue car and four in the red one. The red car has fewer people in it.

No one would say "please put fewer sugar into the pie," but no one seems to have a problem saying there are less people in that line than in this one.

That, I guess, is how language changes. It seems to become less precise and much less useful. (Intuitively, one does know that you wouldn't say "fewer precise.")

Is it just laziness on the part of the average person? Or is the difference between "fewer" and "less" just too hard to learn?

I have fewer and fewer ideas about it and less and less time to try to figure it out. Or is that less and less ideas about it and fewer and fewer time to try to figure it out? Nahhh... it's the first one, don't you agree?

Subway Gum

Years and years ago, they sold gum on the subway platforms in New York City. I don't chew gum any more, but I do see the ghosts of the gum machines.

There were little, flat, square, glass-fronted machines attached to the steel beams that hold up the underground ceilngs at Times Square. You put in a penny and pushed or pulled a lever and out slid chewing gum.

One kind of gum -- Beeman's Pepsin Chewing Gum -- came wrapped in a little piece of translucent white paper. It was flat and a little powdery when you folded back the wrapping. It wasn't quite soft, but not as hard as the pink slabs of bubble gum that came wrapped in every pack of baseball cards sold up until the 1970s. YOu could tell the difference between the pink gum and the baseball card because the gum shattered when you bit it and the cards didn't.

The other kind of subway gum was Chiclets. Those came two to a little yellow box that you had to open before the pieces slid -- white, shiny and pepperminty -- onto your tongue. The cardboard had it's own particular dry, gray taste for the moments that it rested on your tongue before the gum dropped out. Chiclet shells crunched under your teeth then the same way they do now until your teeth mix the shell into the chewy part and all the sugar and mint gets used up.

Under the gum machines were little metal baskets to catch the paper wrappers and little yellow Chiclet boxes. Usually the paper actually ended up in the container.

But the chewed gum was dropped willy nilly, helter skelter all over the subway platform and trampled until it formed hard black blobs on the cement.

Someone in administration probably removed the gum machines because of the troubles scraping the dried gum off of the subway platforms. The thousands and thousands of pennies the gum earned must not have made up for the labor of cleaning.

Ironically, that's the only part of this tradition that's survived: The hard black blobs.

I'm sure they're not the black blobs of my childhood, those were cleaned up or paved over long ago. But they look the same and have the same uneven feeling under you feet when you walk over them that spoils for a moment the smoothness of the cement.

I miss those machines. That was all of the fun: You put in a penny and out came gum. Pennies don't generate that much joy these days. I do so miss those machines.